Visva-Bharati to kick off Dol fest with never-seen Tagore drama

KOLKATA: People visiting Santiniketan to celebrate Basanta Utsab are in for a treat this year. Visva-Bharati has decided to kick off its festival of colours on Wednesday by producing a never-before performed 'natya-geeti' by Tagore. 'Sundor', written in 1925 as a tribute to spring, will be staged at the university's Ashram Math as the annual festival's curtain-raiser. It was reputed to be Tagore's favourite 'natya-geeti' ('drama-musical') that he longed to showcase publicly. Fate, however, had other plans.

Now, almost 80 years after the poet's death, Visva-Bharati has decided to bring 'Sundor' alive as a form of tribute. 'Sundor', incidentally, is the only Tagore musical that has never been performed. When Tagore wrote 'Sundor', it was composed as a piece that had just songs and dances in a sequence, which formed the narrative. The idea was to celebrate spring as a season in all its varieties and compare it with the cycle of life, drawing spiritual parallels wherever possible. The piece was supposed to be performed that same year for Basanta Utsab. A thunderstorm, however, spoiled the evening and the show was called off. For the next three years, Tagore added a lot to 'Sundor' by bringing in dialogues and side intrigues of characters Rani and Basantika. Having done that, he got members of the family to perform the metamorphosed play (now in the 'natya-geeti ' format) at Jorasanko, to see how he had progressed and if it was worth a public performance. Somehow, that, too, never happened. Interestingly, the manuscript of 'Sundor' got stashed away in such a way that it did not even make it to the first editions of the Rabindra Rachanavali. Much later, after the manuscript was located, it was added to the body of Tagore's works in subsequent editions.

"It was definitely not an easy decision. It takes a lot of courage to perform a never-performed text like this because of the expectations. We have stayed true to the text throughout but since there are no reference points of earlier performances to fall back upon, we consulted Tagore drama experts throughout so that there is no deviation from authenticity," said director Amartya Mukherjee, a faculty member at Sangeet Bhavana of the university. "We are thrilled that we have been able to finally bring out 'Sundor'. We will eagerly await the audience's reaction because if they appreciate the performance, we can think of performing it regularly," said VB registrar Sougata Chattopadhyay.